Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival.

• Author: PILKINGTON, STEVE

In the early 1990s a small group of Homer residents dreamed up a festival to celebrate all the special visitors who flock to the Kachemak Bay area this time every year.

The annual visitors, with colorful names like the red-necked phalarope or the red-faced cormorant, are not the Foxworthian denizens found in any local watering hole at the end of the road in Homer. They are part of the more than 100,000 shorebirds migrating through Kachemak Bay on their way to breeding grounds in Alaska's remote tundra.

"When they started the festival they were hoping for it to become what it is now," said Dorle Scholz, coordinator for the 8th Annual Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival in Homer.

The four-day festival now brings national and international visitors to Homer's shores, and each year has helped boost local business while educating the public and novice birders.

This year the festival will run from May 4 to May 7.

Since it began, the festival has helped protect the shorebird habitat and helped Kachemak Bay's inclusion in the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network.

This year, the festival will include free workshops, guided hiking and field trips, boat tours, a wooden boat festival, arts and crafts fairs and a keynote address by Jack Jeffrey, wildlife photographer and Pacific Island bird researcher.

"This year we focus on the Pacific Golden Plover from Hawaii," Scholz said, which is why...